Comments Off on What are mind blowing facts about the English language?

Hello,

Learning Englishcan be difficult to many, especially when the grammar bit comes into the picture. For every grammar rule, there is almost always an exception. Not only that, sometimes the words can be rather confusing as well, especially when it has multiple meanings that change according to context.

However, it’s all these “difficulties” that make the language interesting and entertaining to be learned. Here are some interesting, if not mind-blowing facts about the English language, that probably you didn’t know.

Some interesting facts here :

The word “alphabet” is derived from the first two letters in the Greek alphabet: “alpha” and “beta”.

Acronyms are said like words, while initialisms are individual letters. For example, NATO is an acronym and FBI is an initialism!

In English, multiple adjectives are supposed to be listed in the following order: Quantity, Opinion, Size, Age, Shape, Color, Origin, Material and Purpose

Many English words used to be spelled phonetically (e.g. debt was ‘det’) until some scholars purposely added silent letters to make them look more like Greek or Latin words, sometimes erroneously

The word “electrocute” is a combination of the words electro and execute, meaning killed by electricity. So if you don’t die, you were not electrocuted, you were shocked

The word “legend” originally meant “things to be read.” In the pre-Medieval period, reading and writing were very rare, and so anything worthy of being written down was something very noteworthy, and thus “legendary”; worthy of being written down and read.

The English word ‘infant’ comes from the Latin word ‘infans’, meaning “unable to speak” or “speechless.”

Before the English speaking world was exposed to the fruit, the color orange was referred to as “geoluhread” which is Old English for red-yellow.

Of all the words in the English language, the word “set” has the most definitions -“Set” has 464 definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary. “Run” runs a distant second, with 396. Rounding out the top ten are “go” with 368, “take” with 343, “stand” with 334, “get” with 289, “turn” with 288, “put” with 268, “fall” with 264, and “strike” with 250.

There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: “abstemious” and “facetious.” – a-e-i-o-u! Those are two common words, although some technical terms such as arsenious, acheilous, caesious, also have all five vowels in order. (Source: Oxford Dictionaries).

There is a seven-letter word in the English language that contains ten words without rearranging any of its letters, “therein” can generate: “the, there, he, in, rein, her, here, ere, therein, herein”.

There is a word in the English language with only one vowel, which occurs five times: “indivisibility.”

The word “queue” is the only word in the English language that is still pronounced the same way when the last four letters are removed.

The longest word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. The only other word with the same amount of letters is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses, it’s plural.

The most used letter in the English alphabet is ‘E’ and ‘Z’ is the least used!

“Rhythm” is the longest English word without a vowel.

Thank you for reading this post!!!

Do you have other interesting facts to share? Post them in the comments section.If you wish you to join an English classes in Bhopal, Please visit: TheProficients.in